I love listening to blues music while I’m in the kitchen cooking. It feels good. Those old record scratchy noises, harmonicas and deep smoky voices transform the job of cooking into an experience. Maybe it’s the fact that most blues music is about pain, heartbreak and trouble someone is in and what fixes anything more than comforting food right? Maybe it’s the rhythm that takes what I’m stirring and chopping into a more practiced movement that is slower yet powerful and intentional. Whatever it is I feel soothingly understood in something that is not necessarily my favorite thing to do.
As I sway to the music standing over my stove, I let the song lyrics sink deep into my own bones about what a burden some of life’s troubles can be. How true indeed this is right? We have all had devastating heartbreak, people who’ve done us wrong, just plain trouble knocking at our door. It is however what we do from it that either comes out as soulful beautiful music or just more misery. The essence of it all comes down to our own pursuit of wants for things that will make us happy and give us peaceful contentment and satisfaction.
What I’ve realized in my own life is troubles are always around the corner. There is something that is always going to come up, go wrong, break, get delayed and change. We must choose in those very moments how we’re going to react and response as well as what it will mean to us. How deeply something hurts us is not only determined by the level of pain but our treatment of it. What we do about it and how we use it to create the next moment.
It is so easy to be consumed with what happens in our day and the current trouble we are facing. We can stay in that place of pain and heartache and share our story with others guiding them away from the same. As a mom, I can tell you just telling my son not to do something because I tried it myself, is the surest way for him to try it himself. It is great to share wisdom but being a living example I have found works much better in showing the way to someone else. If you want your child to eat healthier well that really does mean you have to eat vegetables too. If you want troubles to stop knocking at your door, you really do need to stop inviting it in and move on to something better.
When we let our troubles define us they seem to grow and create more until soon it is all we focus on and what takes up all our time. We lose ourselves in the busy of dealing with the next thing hitting us and step farther away from what makes us feel good. We move using adrenaline of the urgency around us rather than our own breath and in what feels right to our mind and body. Many of us have been moving to trouble’s rhythm for so long we have forgotten what it feels like to dance to another tune. It feels dizzying to stop and get off the trouble train.
The basic problem with troubles is we think we always have time and we’ll feel good later when they are all behind us. Yet the only thing that will be behind us is time and a path of troubles we fought against. The trick is learning to not let them dominate all of who we are, all the time we have and start living each day as if it is the very best day we’ve ever had in our life. That can feel unnatural but in fact is spot on for the most natural thing you can do because it changes the very vibration of troubles and no so many actually fit on your doorstep anymore.
When I think of what it means to live naturally well it is just that, being and feeling well. I know that when I feel my best even though there may be some trouble in front of me I can deal with it. I have the endurance, strength and mindset to do what is right for me and not let it be a continued factor in my life. It is a state of awareness that we must choose to live our own life or let what goes on around us dictate that time. Call my rebellious but I prefer to make my own choices and my blues song is a tale of empowerment and a life lived naturally well.
Here’s where it gets interesting. We all have this same choice. Yes there are days where there is just more than I can deal with in a single day and I’m overwhelmed, tired and stressed but that is not my norm. It doesn’t have to be your norm either. We can let happiness into our life now, every day even when it doesn’t feel like there is anything to be happy about.. We choose the song that’s playing and how we dance to it. We choose what we let into our day and how it works to make us feel better or not. We choose to be awakened and free or tied down and checked out. Which do you choose?
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